Trasformazioni. Trieste
Trasformazioni. Trieste, il territorio e la sua gente nella fotografia d’arte, 1880-2020
(Transformations. Trieste, its Territory and its People in Art Photography, 1880-2020)
Church of San Francesco
via beato Odorico da Pordenone, 1, Udine
14 December 2024 - 26 January 2025
Tuesdays-Fridays 3 p.m. – 7 p.m.
Saturdays and Sundays 11 a.m. – 7 p.m.
25 December 2024 (Christmas) 3 p.m. – 7 p.m.
1 January 2025 (New Year's Eve) 3 p.m. – 7 p.m.
Free Entry
The church of San Francesco hosts the yearly photo exhibition organised by IRPAC - Istituto Regionale di Promozione e Animazione Culturale.
The second edition of the 3-year project Trasformazioni (Transformations) is dedicated to Trieste and the Julian territory, with its extraordinary variety of the landscape, between the Karst and the Adriatic Sea, and the peculiarity of its architecture.
Trieste's historical cosmopolitan vocation and its connection to the Germanic world reverberate, even in photography. This is testified by the production of a number of professional photographers with a Teutonic sound, such as Francesco Benque, active in the city from 1864 until 1921, or Giuseppe Wulz, with his atelier opened in 1860, whose production was not limited to portraits but also extended to the depiction of landscapes and moments of life from life.
The Wulz dynasty (with Joseph's son Charles and granddaughters Wanda and Marion) was active throughout the 20th century until 1981. To the city and its rich history, which was also dramatic for long stretches, local artistic photography has dedicated countless shots, which will be selected on the basis of their ability to tell the emotional places they evoke, from the romantic architecture of the Porto Vecchio to the evocative ‘hell’ of the Ferriera di Servola, from Miramare Castle to the unspeakable monstrosity of the Risiera di San Saba.
The exhibition will display reproductions by female photographers such as Anna Scrinzi and Emilia Manenizza, as well as by Mario Circovich, Adriano De Rota, and Alfonso Mottola, in addition to those of the two main press agencies historically present in the city, Ugo Borsatti and Giornalfoto, where a new and more iconic impact of narrative photography was experimented with, in the wake of the lessons of refined US photojournalism.
The exhibition also includes some ‘external’ views of the Trieste and Julian territory by several Friulian authors, including Italo Michieli, Carlo Dalla Mura and Andrea Arduini.
The history of the Slovene community also has its most effective storyteller, Mario Magajna, for over half a century an extraordinary narrator on the pages of the Primorskj Dvenik, the Slovene-language daily newspaper printed in Trieste, of daily life in the Karst and Benecja regions and an author of great formal effectiveness.
The long work of Claudio Erné, who documented Franco Basaglia's activity in the psychiatric hospital in Trieste, as well as many other events in Trieste for local and national weekly newspapers, including L'Espresso, is also witnessed as a trait-d'union between old and new photojournalism.
Nowadays, from the perspective of contemporary art declined through photography, the territory is being restored and often transfigured by the expressive elaboration of the subjects, such as in Tullio Stravisi's images of the Trieste Karst, or by the recovery of ancient photographic techniques such as the pinhole, in Andrej Furlan's work, or Massimiliano Muner's Polaroid montages or Elisa Biagi's projects on memory.